10/18/2006 @ 12:34PM

A New Kid On The Wiki Block

While Wikipedia, a veritable online depository of human knowledge, has proven to be a useful source of information for millions of people, one impossibly difficult question has been its accuracy. Now one of the co-founders of the site is preparing to launch a rival online encyclopaedia that will “improve upon Wikipedia’s extremely useful, but often uneven work.”

“Citizendium,” created by Larry Sanger, will allow anyone to create an entry, but it will also have experienced editors and subject authorities verify the information submitted.

Editors will apply by checking off a list of criteria and then publishing their credentials for other users to examine. Contributors will also have to use their real names, rather than create entries anonymously.

Anchorage, Alaska-bred Sanger believes he is improving on Wikipedia’s concept of pooling the world’s collective knowledge. “We may take Wikipedia as an early prototype,” he said on his website. Wikipedia, he said, had no special place for academics because so many users had abused the ability to edit entries. “As a result, it seems likely that the project will never escape its amateurism,” he added.

Or vandalism. Late last year the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway was shocked to find his Wikipedia biography sabotaged and littered with a number of libelous statements, while Adam Curry, the former MTV video jockey, also admitted to anonymously editing his own entry to embellish his role in the creation of a well-known podcast.

The problem with accuracy and neutrality are perhaps most evident in Larry Sanger’s own Wikipedia entry, which is accompanied by a lengthy, “talk page” of heated discussions between Sanger and other contributors, including Jimmy Wales, the other Wikipedia founder .

Wales has regularly insisted that he is the sole founder of popular website, and told one newspaper this year it was “preposterous” to call Sanger the co-founder. Sanger maintains that he first suggested the “wiki” concept to Wales, his boss at the early online encyclopedia Nupedia.

Sanger’s Citizendium is really more an offshoot than a new project, as Sanger says it will be a “fork” of Wikipedia’s open-source code. But the deep-seated rivalry is potent. The Citizendium, Sanger said, will try to “unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online.”

A test version of Citizendium to be launched this week in Harmon, California, though only its editors and contributors will be able to view it.